Boku no Hero Academia 72 Review: Midoriya's Fail Speech

Boku no Hero Academia, Chapter 72: Day Two
 

Apparently Class B is going to be joining Class A? That is a bit weird that they weren’t thrown into the big jungle of death thing and instead came by bus. We see Class B’s teacher, who we haven’t met before, the Blood Hero “Blad King”. Or maybe Vlad King, because of the whole blood hero thing. He does seem to have tubes on his back and reverse-vampire-fangs, so maybe? We still don’t know a whole ton about the Class B people – and I can even barely keep track of the names of the minor Class A characters – but at the very least they have interesting designs.

The way to upgrade quirks is apparently simple – you just have to keep training and using them like how you would train your muscles to get stronger. And we get this big spread showing them just, well, doing a bit of a hell training. Kaminari’s on a cliff just letting out all the lightning, Ojiro is fighting Kirishima, Todoroki’s chilling in a tub creating a crapton of ice, Bakugou has his hands… in hot water? Mineta’s ripping out a shit ton of sticky grape balls, Cero and Aoyama are shooting their respective stuff out, Momo and ‘eat sweets to get stronger’ dude are eating a lot, Uraraka is in some kind of ball…

Also, apparently the mutant-types like Shouji and Tsuyu have a less demanding training of simply, well, training their mutated body parts.

Also, apparently the Wild Wild Pussycats have two other members we don’t see last time, one of them being this big, muscular cat-muscle-man in a dress. Because Japan. They’re apparently pretty well-suited for training, and we get a little introdump of their capabilities. Ragdoll (who has really creepy hyper-caffeinated eyes) has the quirk ‘Search’ that allows her to monitor 100 people, including their locations and weak points. Pixiebob has the quirk ‘Flowstone’ that allows her to create training grounds and she’s probably the one that made the rock animals before. Mandelei has the quirk ‘Telepath’, which allows her to instruct the students.

Big muscle-man, Tiger, is a big muscle man to train the muscles of the muscle-less students – he’s flexible enough to dodge Midoriya’s 5% Detroit Punch, at least. He’s just weird. There’s apparently a long running joke how he acts like a certain boot-camp viral video in Japan that just goes over my head,

We get a bit of them making curry and Momo talking about how her quirk of ‘Creation’ actually draws from her body fat to create things – which is a nice little limitation to her seemingly-broken powers so she can’t just create, like, a big Gundam army or something like that. Which Cero compares to being similar to poop. Which leaves Momo depressed (come on, she just got her confidence back) while Kyouka beats Cero up. That was funny.

We get a scene of Midoriya talking to the annoying little kid (whose name I can’t be bothered to look up). And I do like how Midoriya just doesn’t really know what to say – he knows enough about heroes to deduce the kid’s parents are the Water Horses, but the foul-mouthed little kid is just generally angry at the superhero world in general and hate heroes and villains with the same amount of vitriol. Midoriya talks a bit about how he himself have experienced the stigma of being quirkless, and how the dickpuncher kid shouldn’t reject things so harshly. It's a nice speech, and it's far more realistic thanks to the kid rejecting Midoriya's speech. Because that's what real people do when someone you barely know runs up and gives a speech about how you should be more accepting of things.

Midoriya heads off and we see the cliffside behind the dickpuncher being… kinda broken with water splashes? So maybe he does have a quirk and all his rant is as much self-loathing as general hatred for the superhero community?

Of course, the Villain Alliance shows up. Well, the newcomers, at any rate, Toga and Dabi – previously translated as Bamboo Joints which really didn’t make sense since Dabi means ‘Cremation’. Which is an absolutely metal sounding villain name. Toga’s had some weird cage-like thing covering the underside of her face and has these weird contraptions strapped on. Dabi’s as creepy as ever, talking about how the young heroes riddled with holes will fall to the earth for a brighter future or some shit like that. Two other dudes with them is this tiny schoolboy with a Darth Vader mask and a cloaked dude with Jason Voorhes’ mask.

Yeah, not an eventful chapter, but we get some nice character moments from Midoriya, a nice little training montage, as weird as Tiger is, and the potential of something far more explosive and exciting with actual villains in play.